A Little Melancholy But Mostly Grand

Back in the vehicle again today and I picked up Lily and the boys and we dropped the boys off at their other grandmother's house and for Owen, his two grandmothers meeting up and talking is just too much World's Colliding! but somehow, we managed it without the sun exploding or anything. Then we drove to a newish (I think) vegan restaurant where we met Jessie and Vergil who had just gotten back from NC and it was so good to see him. 

When I see Vergil now there is absolutely no line between him and family. He, like Jason, is us. And it feels so right to have him home although I am sure that his family in Black Mountain was mighty glad to have him back to that home for awhile. It was a working trip for him but he did get to visit and to see his niece and nephew and spend time with his mama. 

Anyway, we all ate delicious vegan food. I had the tempah reuben and carrot ginger slaw. Vergil had a little bit of a problem when he asked if he could get some of the "fakin' bacon" on his black bean burger and they said that no, he could not. That was only for the special. He asked about the cheese on the burger. Was it real cheese? Real vegan cheese, he was informed. And trust me, the ladies running this joint can put you in your place. Hot vegan chicks with tattoos and vegan attitudes. Whatever that means. Just that they could whip my ass, I guess.

After we ate, Vergil took off for Ultimate Frisbee and the ladies and I went to meet May at the nail place and we all got our pedicures and I even got a manicure but no color on the fingernails. It doesn't last a day the way I use my hands so what's the point? They look very nice and I almost fell asleep during it. 

I have been sleepy all day and got quiet again although I did make Lily laugh when I told her, "It's not gay if it's a three-way." 

I don't even remember the context of this remark and if I did I wouldn't be telling you.

I love my daughters. 

They love each other. They love their mama. And their mama sure loves them. And my god, how we can make each other laugh.

Owen asked me if tomorrow we could make bread or cookies when they come over. I told him that yes, we could make cookies and he asked if I had any chocolate chips. "No," I said. "But on my way home I'll stop and get some."

"Oh, that's okay!" he said. "We'll just bring some with us."

I assured him that I needed to go to the store anyway and I did get chocolate chips and oh! Lily and I stopped at the brand new International Foods grocery store on our way to pick up the boys and we had such a good time there, checking out the exotic-to-us foods. We both bought a few things including just-made vegetable samosas. Their dried beans are priced very, very reasonably and we'll be back for that alone, if nothing else. 

I am back home now, of course, and the chickens are put up, of course, and I am still feeling quiet. I feel achey, too. And still tired and I think I will go to bed early. I stayed up way too late last night watching the last two episodes of Olive Kitteridge on HBO and it just made me sad. Francis McDormand is such an amazing actor and her performance as an aging, unhappy woman whose life does not hold much joy is a wonder to behold but like I said- sad. 

Bill Murray came in at the last and his character, too, was sad. A big bowl of sad and real enough for me to taste the salt of the teary soup and perhaps that had its effect on me today. Art can do that which is why I am being very picky about what I expose myself to right now. Not that I need to only focus on the cheery and the sunny, on the all-ends-well-and-they-live-happily-ever-after but Jesusgod, let there be a few deep, earthy belly laughs along the way.

And in that spirit, let me give you this. I have posted it before but hell, it's worth watching again. 

Guess I'll go eat some veggie samosas and settle into bed early to read. It's not cold tonight but it's supposed to be down in the low twenties by Tuesday and we here in North Florida are all horrified and bewildered, disbelieving and ill-prepared.
I know. Go ahead and laugh. Floridians are used to being the butt of the nation's jokes. We know we're all crazy which is fine with us because if we weren't, we would all go insane.
(Thanks, Jimmy Buffett.)
We live in the penis of the nation, our governor (twice elected!) is a criminal alien, we find alligators in our pools and laundry rooms, bears on our porches, snakes in our parlors, bats in our chimneys and draperies, ghosts in our machinery, stories in the mouths of every one of our elders and most of our children, retirees from every state and NONE OF THEM CAN DRIVE, guns in the hands of anyone who wants one, rivers that are as beautiful and tranquil as anything you've ever imagined, raccoons in the garbage, armadillos flattened on every road, hurricanes, tornadoes, palm trees, two oceans, incredible seafood, the one and only native American tribe which never admitted defeat to the US government, bones of mastodons and prehistoric armadillos which were bigger than VW Bugs, the biggest and most beautiful springs in the world which pump out millions of gallons of water a day, Key West AND some of the most homophobic people on earth, mansions and shacks and manatees and sharks and roaches which can fly and which you cannot kill with a sledge hammer.

I could go on. But I won't.

I'll just say that we're going to freak out on Tuesday fearing that our very bones will break in the cold and that I hope my front-porch ferns, quilt-and-blanket wrapped, will survive.

Love...Ms. Moon

This Is Florida

When Mr. Moon and I were crossing the bay from Lanark to Dog Island we saw something we'd never seen before. I tried to take the picture but that doesn't do it justice. The colors were brilliant- blues and greens and red. Not a rainbow but clouds lit with the colors of the rainbow. I looked it up and it's a phenomenon known as circumhorizontal arc or fire rainbow. 

All my years and it was the first time I'd ever seen it. Never even heard of it. 

It was glorious. 

Here's my Viking husband. He is happiest on the water. 

The crossing went so very smoothly and we pulled up right behind the house as it was high tide. Mr. Moon toted all the bins and ice chests up to the house and we turned on the AC and put things away and tried to cool down. It is wicked hot. 

All is well here in our little shacky house. Its smells as it always does with its particular odor of baked wood and old furniture and sulphur water and something undefinable which is probably made up of the dried husks of scorpions and the restless spirits of those who haunt this place. 

We've had our nap and the tide is going out. I am sitting on the back porch (how I love a porch) and the island insects are chanting their late afternoon devotions and dragonflies do air acrobatics and the pine trees and scrub oaks reach out their wind-twisted branches. 

The sky to the east grows dark and thunder rolls across the bay. 

I am most glad to be here with my Viking, my love, my husband. 

Sunset pictures to follow unless there is a storm and that would be fine too. 

Florida

Last night's supper was ridiculous.
Ridiculously delicious.

That's what we call seafood here in North Florida. 

Yeah, I know. 

Shut up.

We drove through the piney woods down to Spring Creek where they've been catching and cooking seafood just like that for at least thirty-five years. Probably more. Same family. Catch it, cook it. Serve it.

Such a massive meal that all I ate was the mullet. The rest is in the refrigerator and we'll eat that tonight. The shrimp, the oysters, the crab cake, the baked potato. So okay, maybe I ate my hushpuppies. Mr. Moon didn't finish his dinner either so there's plenty for another feast tonight. 

Here's how long it takes to drive from Spring Creek to Lloyd: One listening to High Hopes, Bruce Springsteen's newest album. 

Here's how long it takes to drive from Publix to Lloyd: One listening to Cream's Sunshine of Your Love and one listening to Joan Baez singing I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night. 

Maybe that's how I should be measuring time, or, alternately, in coffee cups, as recommended by T.S. Eliot. 

We saw so many deer last night as we drove home. They were standing on the side of the road under the moonlight, their eyes shining green. We didn't hit a one. Thank god. Bruce sang us home, his thick, lush voice calling out and the deer escorted us. 

Florida. It is a place I love so much and yet, it never ceases to amaze and sadden me at the same time. If you could see the brightness this morning- the flowers I talk about so much (too much), the birds (same), the bright blue sky. If you could taste mullet so fresh that it was probably swimming the morning you ate it, so white and pure, tasting of both Gulf and river. If you could see that house we looked at yesterday, built entirely of pine boards never touched by paint except for one room, a true Florida Cracker home. If you could sleep in the room I sleep, built way over a hundred years ago and still so accommodating to our needs here in the 21st century, so peaceful that when Gibson wakes up from his nap on my bed he merely sits up and smiles. 

And yet- if you're a white man in Florida, you can still murder a young black man and practically or truly get away with it. It's a state where money talks and the environment suffers and where we expect our politicians to be crooks and we have, at this moment, a governor who should probably be in jail for Medicare fraud but instead, is living high on the hog in the Governor's mansion, making decisions that affect every one of us, our air, our water, our ability to get health care. 

It's a conundrum, this state. It is as full of glory and mystery and black rivers and blue and green waters eyebrowed by sand as white and sugared as can be found any place on earth. It was inhabited so many thousands of years ago that we don't even know and you can bet those people ate fine fresh mullet and oysters, shrimp and venison. We find their spear points, their fish hooks, their pottery, their footsteps. We have the richest and the poorest. We have Miami Beach mansions which are more like palaces than houses and we have falling-in-shacks and rusted out trailers where the less fortunate live out their lives, baking in summer's heat and freezing in winter's cold. 

We have countless tiny white wooden churches, storefront churches, churches in modular metal buildings, we have Scientology's Super Power building. Whateverthefuck that is. 

We have excellent seafood. And back roads to carry you to the places where you can eat it, miles of blacktop where you might go for two cups of coffee or five or six songs before you see another car. We have red dirt, black dirt, we have palm trees, cactus, some of the oldest trees living on the earth, giant Cypress that have stood sentinel on the banks of rivers since the ancients canoed down them. We have caves and we have the bones of the mastodons, the saber tooth tiger, the giant armadillos who used to roam, big as Volkswagens. 

We have crime and very often we do not have justice. We have the death penalty and the law doesn't seem to mind using it. 

Well. Good morning. It's Sunday. My god it is beautiful. The boys are coming out today. Mr. Moon is thinking about taking them fishing in some pond or creek. Maybe. He's working on their play set which stands under the shade of quite-possibly six-or-seven hundred year old oak trees. 

Here's what Owen looked like last night with his new cat, Parker. 

I am feeling mighty all right. Still some trippy but I slept good last night and made biscuits and grits and eggs this morning. The food of my people, or at least my adopted people. I wonder how many biscuits have been baked and eaten in this house. I wonder how many chickens have laid how many eggs in this yard. I wonder how many children have played in the woods around this house. How many trains have passed by, shaking the windows in their frames. I wonder how many babies have been born in this house, how many people have danced here, died here. 

I will never know. I live in a land of mysteries, a house of mysteries and some day I will be a part of that mystery. I live in a state of corruption and greed. I live in a state of wonder and grace.

Happy Sunday, y'all. 

Love...Ms. Moon

I learned yesterday, via Facebook of course, that my Aunt Harriet died. This was my mother's brother Davis's wife. Both of Mother's brothers, Davis and Jimmy, died before Mother did and Jimmy's first wife died years ago. His second wife is still alive, I do believe. 

We are not a close family but it is sad to think of all of that generation being gone now. I have a picture of Jimmy and Davis and Mother when they were children, Mother actually just a baby. It's one of the few things I kept of Mother's. It was always on her dresser and when her mind started to lose some of its connections, she would show it to me every time I came to visit her.
"Have you ever seen this picture?" she would ask me. "I love it." And she would touch it with her fingertips.

My mother loved her childhood. She never wearied of telling me stories about growing up on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Her brothers were the loves of her life. After her father, that is, who never, as long as she lived to tell, could do any wrong in her eyes. Except for one thing. He was too harsh by far with her brother Davis. That, she would admit. Davis was the middle child. His older brother, Jimmy, was by all accounts a golden boy. He had talent in art and excelled in school. He was well-behaved and everyone adored him. And Mother was the baby and the apple of her father's eye and the only girl so she never had to fight for attention. But Davis- well, tucked into the middle there where he was and with a wicked sense of humor which often found its target in pranks which got him into trouble, there was no way he could ever get the validation of his father the way the other two could. And he suffered for it and he got punished for trying (I am playing armchair psychologist here) to get his parents' attention any way he could. I'm sure that my grandfather believed in "spare the rod and spoil the child" and when it came to Davis, he did not spare that rod at all.

Even Mother admitted that. 

It's so odd. I remember when I was a child and we would all get together, my grandparents, my mother and my brother and me, her brothers and their wives and children. We would usually all meet up in Vero Beach, Florida at the Sea Cove Cottages, long since gone.  

We would play in the Atlantic and on the beach and in the pool, we would sleep sandy and close in the little bedrooms. And I, who had no father and whose mother was so unhappy, would look at my aunts and my uncles and their families and I would think how happy they looked. How perfect my cousins' lives appeared to me. No. That's a lie. Not perfect. Just normal. And normal seemed perfect to me then. 

Of course, as I've grown older, I've learned that my cousins' lives were far from perfect but I still think so fondly back to those vacations, to my aunts and uncles, to my cousins. Two of them are gone now too. One, my cousin Bruce, Harriet and Davis's son, who died years ago from cancer, and before he died, his sister, Maryanne, who was murdered.  

So much tragedy. How do we humans contain it all? I do not know. And then, we die. Not to be shallow or anything. But it is the way of it. 

Harriet actually visited in this house. She had come down to spend time with Mother not long after we moved here and she and Mother came out one Sunday morning for pancakes. I'm glad I got to see her. Despite all of the sorrow and horror she had had to face in her life along with some serious health problems, she was upbeat. She was cheerful. She loved my house. 

Family.

And speaking of, I spent a good part of the day today with Lily and Owen and Gibson. We went to Target. 

That's what Gibson looked like wearing a barbecue chef's hat, drinking an Icee. 

Owen was wearing his Power Rangers costume which looks like this.

Lily had taken that picture earlier when he was posing before doing his death-defying leap off of her headboard onto the bed which gives me a little heart-attack every time he does it. 

Besides Target we also went to the Big Library, which is what we call the main branch, lunch at Welcome-To-Moe's, and Publix. It was a long day and by the end of our time in Publix, Owen wanted to get out of there and get home. "I feel like I'm breaking," he said. 

"I do too," I told him. "Hang on. We're about done."

One of the things I realize about being a grandmother is that I have a lot in common with my grandsons. I don't really care what other people think and I like to wear whatever makes me happy. And when I hear music, I like to dance, no matter where I am. 

And I hope that my grandsons remember these things about me. I remember things about my own grandfather, born in 1888, that are as present to me as what I did yesterday. Perhaps this is a sign of older age. I don't know. I remember how when it was time to go to bed and I was six years old, he never kissed me, but would show all the affection he could show by brushing my face with his own bristly face. 

It wasn't perfect and I have no idea if it was normal, but it was him and he showed me the pictures in his National Geographic books and I remember that too, especially the picture of Early Man hunting the Wooly Mammoth. I will probably think about that picture on my deathbed. That, and my grandfather's bristly face. 

Family. Again and always. The way the DNA entwines and ladders itself forever and ever as long as the blood shall survive. 

Good night, y'all. 

Happy Friday. Be at peace, Aunt Harriet. 

Love...Ms. Moon

Maybe I Should Wash My Crocs Before We Go

We had a very fine time at lunch today and then we went down to the New Leaf Market where we got to see Billy and seeing Billy always makes my day happier. He tickles Gibson and makes him laugh and then he says, "Too bad that kid isn't cute," which makes us all laugh. I told him that we are going down to Singer Island this weekend. Despite the fact that I've lived in Florida for fifty-three years, I had never even heard of this place until recently and whenever I mention it to anyone they sort of shake their heads and go, "Oh, Singer Island," and I don't know what they mean but I'm starting to get it.
What they mean is that it's hoity toity. Or, a rich-people place. Billy brought the whole thing more into focus when told me that his brother-in-law used to work down there and one night Billy and Shayla and the brother-in-law went to the fancy-schmancy bar of one of the hotels on the island and had an extremely good time.
"We were the only trash there," he said.

Oh Lord.

I have a feeling we might feel a little out of place on Singer Island. I have a feeling I might be the only person on the entire island who keeps chickens if you get what I'm saying. And actually (a word that Owen seems to be using with some regularity now) it's not an island but a peninsula.

Brenda, Mr. Moon's sister, told me a few months ago that I was in charge of researching stuff to do while we're there. My research so far has consisted of a few quick Google searches revealing not much unless you're in the market for a mansion, but I hear the shopping is really great. My plan is to get down there and check out the ubiquitous brochures to be found everywhere in the state of Florida where tourists might congregate. I figure the hotel will have a few suggestions too.
And of course, there's always the option of getting trashed by the pool.
One would hope that at the very least there will be some blogfodder. Maybe I could do a photo post of surgically enhanced breasts. I'm just assuming that we'll see some. I'm pretty sure there will probably be more of those than chickens on the island. Uh, peninsula.

Stay tuned.

A Love Letter To Florida

That picture has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that I like it so very much. When I was five years old, my mother and my brother and I moved to Florida and it was still a very wild place and mystical and magical, especially for a child who lived in a very small village on the banks of a river where there were woods and jungle and white-sand roads and mangoes and oranges and grapefruit growing on trees and even an island which a very tall man took us to visit in his boat where the fossils of mammoths quite literally littered the ground. Teeth and vertebra, there for the picking up and taking home. The Atlantic Ocean was only a few miles away and to get there we crossed a wooden bridge which bump, bump, bumped as we crossed it and there was a drawbridge and a man with one arm seemed to live in a little hut, right there on the bridge, and when a tall boat came down the river, traffic stopped and he turned the giant wheel with that one strong arm so that a piece of the bridge swung out and the boat came through and once, I swear to you, I saw a Chinese junk sail through and that was only one bit of the magic of the Florida I lived in.
It seems to me that before we moved to Florida, everything was in black and white and then suddenly, like when Dorothy landed in Oz, everything was in a sort of brilliant, tropical Technicolor, everything red and pink and orange and bright green and blue. We had lived in Chattanooga before we moved and that was a beautiful place but it might have been a completely different planet from the place where we landed on the banks of the Sebastian River near the ocean.
Not only was there the true, real magic of the place- the mangoes and the river and the ocean and the stingray we caught off the dock and the cruising sharks we could see from that dock and the birds and the man named Chester who had hair down his back and a beard like Christ long before the hippies, who lived deep in the woods and grew turnips and sold them door-to-door and Aunt Katie who was the village's oldest resident who told stories of when she was a child and there were no roads and the rivers were the only way to travel from one place to another and the Indians who would go by in their canoes and sometimes stop to borrow her family's dogs for hunting- not only was there all of that but there were also the beautiful, wonderful, kitschy tourist attractions starring parrots and monkeys and alligators and mermaids before Disney came and the hungry mouse named Mickey gobbled them all up, never to be seen again.
And sometimes, to a child, at least, the best part of those tourist traps were the gift shops where you could buy necklaces with sunsets made of butterfly wings and earrings made of tiny seashells, painted unlikely colors, and orange blossom perfume and pecan logs and salt water taffy and intricate tableus made of shells which you could plug in and which would light up and those little Seminole dolls made of palmetto fiber with beads and earrings and dresses of incredibly colored, pieced and rick-racked fabric.

I had one, I think, as a child that a friend of my mother's gave me and I do not know what happened to that doll or to my mammoth teeth either. But I have found the three dolls you see above in various places and when I find one, I am always happy and if it's not too pricey (and oh! they are not cheap anymore!) I buy it and bring it home.

They remind me, those dolls, of the good part of my childhood- the part that no one could destroy for me with sadness or with neglect or with pain because there was that magical part which was so strong where pirates could well have buried treasure in the ground beside my house near the river or where I could still feel quite clearly the ghosts of the Indians and the wild cats Aunt Katie talked about and the beach which was still wild and free of houses for miles and miles and where Spanish doubloons were sometimes found and once I came across the body of a dead shark and I have never gotten that image out of my mind, that sandpaper skin, that jaw of deadly teeth. 

I miss that part of Florida and amazingly, some of it is still there. I have talked about Roseland, where we lived, many times. It is one of the best parts of who I am. It is the part which sustained me during what, looking back, I now realize was one of the worst times of my life. Perhaps the very worst. And being a child, I had so very few resources to help me through it all. But I had a few adults who, although they didn't have any idea what was really going on in my life, seemed to know that I needed special care and they gave it freely and with love. And I had all of that magic which my child's mind took and wove into a sort of protective quilt which I could crawl under and be safe. Or, at least, a little bit safe.

I remember one night I "camped out" with my best friend Lucille Ferger in a tent we'd made in her yard by stretching a blanket from the side of an out building to their chicken coop and we had peanut butter and saltine crackers and those coils you could burn to keep off the mosquitoes and I remember us sitting outside our homemade tent, looking up at the sky and above us in the quiet night were so many stars that the word "infinite" took on meaning for the first time.
I have never seen sky like that since then and I never expect to again but I will tell you this- the wonder of those stars, their infinite number, the infinite totality of space, gave me a perspective which, along with the river, the ocean, the magic of Chester and the Chinese junk and the presence of the ghosts of the people who had lived there so long before me, sustained me and lives within me still.

That's why I like that picture. That's why I love my little dolls.

I am from Florida, even though I was not born here. She took me in and allowed me to stay in her hot, snaky, watery, prickly, sandy, jungly, mango-stained bosom. And for most of my life now, I have taken solace in it, be it cold winter or steaming summer, in gentle salt-water waves and freezing cold springs and rivers with water as clear as gin. Now I live far from the Atlantic and closer to the Gulf; I live where oak trees which are hundreds of years old shade me and offer me a bit of that same sense of the infinite which I gleaned under the stars in Lucille Ferger's yard beside a chicken coop where a mean red rooster named Kruschev slept on his roost.

Florida has changed a lot since I was a child so long ago but great fishes still sleep in its waters, there are still old Spanish treasures to be discovered, there are arrowheads and spearpoints to be found which perhaps pierced the hide of the great mammoth whose bones still rest in its earth along with the bones of the men who hunted them so bravely with such small and deadly weapons. And one of the greatest gifts of my life is that I arrived here at a time when my need and my imagination both were greatest.

I love that picture. I love my dolls.

I still love Florida.

Now remind me of all of this when hurricane season begins, which will be soon because Florida does not give a shit that I live here and love it. She is as cruel as she is beautiful and no matter who tries to tame it with pavement and with dredging and with theme parks and with air conditioning, ultimately, we are at her mercy and we are best not to forget that, even on a warm spring night when the air is so soft and the tea olive is perfuming the air and the resurrection fern decorates the branches of the ancient oaks and good Lord! as if on cue, the first whippoorwill that I've heard this year calls so sweetly and distantly from the swamp south of my house. There are already mosquitoes which live by feeding on our blood and the bamboo grows at the rate of six inches a day or more. And you know what? I don't care.
I love it here.

Sleep well but not too long because the wisteria will cover and bind you.

Love...Ms. Moon

Let Us Be Grateful

My son just called me to ask if I was okay because it was almost eleven o'clock and I had not put up a post.

Now how sweet is that?

I told him that I was quite fine and indeed, I am. I just took a good walk and hadn't settled down to writing anything yet and then we chatted. Beside the walk I've talked on the phone to Mr. Moon and to Jessie and am feeling pretty good about life today. Don't ask me why.

I saw three rabbits on my walk. That was about the most exciting thing about it. That and the fact that I did not die either by heat stroke, snake bite, rabid fox bite, or drive-by shooting.
Lloyd is a crazy place and any of those could happen but of course, none did. I said hello to the man who sits in the truck at the intersection of Main Street and Highway 59. He has been doing this for at least seven years. Don't ask me why on that one, either. We nod at each other and say, "Mornin'," in a rather solemn manner. He does not talk much. To me, at least.

I also said hey to the guy who, when I lived in Lloyd thirty years ago, we called The Sheik because he always wore a headwrap like The Sheik of Arabi might have worn and he always sat under a tree at the crossroads. I think drugs may have been involved in that situation but now he just wears a hat and walks with a cane and is very pleasant.
"Don't get too hot," he said to me. I am a white woman who turns redder than fire when she walks in the heat and I probably do look alarming.
"Oh, I won't. I'm almost home," I told him. And indeed I was.

I am loving Lloyd today. It's the same as always but I am especially loving it with its giant live oaks, its peculiar characters (me being one of them), the fact that there are chickens here and goats and the post office is in the oldest still-standing railroad station in the state. The fact that the trees spread their branches over me and offer shade, both where I live and where I walk, the fact that it has offered me its dirt-breast to grow vegetables and flowers in. The fact that it is filled with birds of all sorts from the tiny finches to the hawks to the owls to the eagles to the Mississippi Kites which soar over my neighbor's house on wings of great length and strength, their split-tailed bodies like kites; yes, they are well-named.

You cannot get cable here or a pizza delivered but that is of little matter when you can grow tomatoes in your yard and can make your own pizza crust or foccacia bread to bake them on with basil you have grown too.

Yes. I am content today and Owen will be coming soon. He has so many new words that I can't believe it. "Mer-Mer!" he yells at me from the next room. "Play!"
And so we shall. We shall play and feed crackers to the chickens and maybe take a carrot to the mule and we will get very dirty and we will wash off and we will take a nap.
He may not want one, but he's going to get one anyway. I don't care how many books I have to read him, he's going to get a nap and I am going to take it with him.
And then Bop will come home and perhaps they will do something together in the garage, something manly, and I will make them something for supper. Something with tomatoes and maybe even eggplant because I have a nice, ripe one for picking.

And then we'll give him his bath so that when his mama comes to pick him up, he'll be sweet-smelling and gorgeous, perhaps running around naked.

Yes. I am having one of those moments wherein it feels as if for this second, right this second at least, I exactly where I need to be, living exactly as I should be.

Phew.

And if it only rains...well, that would make it all perfection. I am content and I am well and so are the ones I love.

Reporting in from Lloyd...Ms. Moon

Why I Feel Comfortable In Such An Old House

I am old. I remember when men were wiry and thin and squatted on their haunches to talk when they got together and built boats, not because it was their life-time dream to do so but because they fished to feed their families and they needed a new boat in which to do so.
I remember when those men, upon rising from their beds in the afternoons after fishing all night would spend hours and hours and hours mending their nets.
Really. I remember that.

I am so old I remember the Fuller Brush man and boy, was he thin! toting that big case of his, door-to-door, and he'd come into the kitchen and squat and open the case and give my mother free fingernail brushes and show her new products and she would buy them. He had a Yankee accent, our Fuller Brush man and he always wore a suit even though this was in Central Florida and he sweated a lot but he never complained and he had a crew cut that he'd rub his hand over.
I remember that.

I remember the old lady my mother would sometimes hire to babysit my baby brothers and how I would always end up being the one to take care of them because she was OLD! She barely moved, but would sit in the rocker in the living room (the same one that my grandson pulls himself up in these days in my library) and she would rock and rock and rock. She would also sit at the piano and play chords and sing along but this was not quite music- it was eerie and dirge-like and it drove me crazy but sometimes, oh sometimes, she would get in the kitchen and fry a chicken and make potato salad and she put apples in her potato salad and honey, it was so good.

I remember spending the night at my best friend's house. Her name was Lucille and she and I would make a tent by stretching a blanket from an old out-building to the chicken coop and we'd burn a mosquito coils and I can't remember the brand name (do you?) and they were a sort of incense which no adult in his or her right mind would now allow a child to burn in a homemade tent but these were the old days when children were believed to have enough sense not to kill themselves. We would peek our heads out from under the blanket and the stars were so plentiful that it was like the rash of the worst case of Chicken Pox you ever saw, that crowded and thick with stars and we were in wonder.
I remember Chicken Pox.

I remember when girls were named things like Jeanette and had fiances with names like Dorsal. Or was it Dorsel? I don't know. But I remember. And I remember when a girl named Jeanette and her fiance, named Dorsal, took a bunch of us kids to the Tastee Freez and bought us chocolate dip cones and when we stopped at a gas station, Jeanette walked over to the hose that always used to lie in front of gas stations with that bell in it that rang when you pulled in so that the attendant (there was an attendant!) would know you were there and would come out and pump your gas and wash your windshield, and Jeanette put her heels over the hose and brought down the weight of her skinny body and it made the hose ding and I thought that was the coolest thing in the entire world.
She wore flats that showed toe cleavage and I was sure that Jeanette was the coolest, sexiest woman in the world and she and Dorsal were like sex on a stick, that full of hormones and kisses and she had a transistor radio in a little leather case and I wanted everything Jeanette had- the boyfriend, the shoes that made toe cleavage, the sass and the transistor radio.
I remember Jeanette.

I am not old enough to remember dinosaurs walking the earth but I do remember walking on a dredge island in the Indian River where mammoth teeth and vertebra were there on the surface to trip over and we picked them up and brought them home and kept them in the laundry room. I don't know why we kept them in the laundry room but we did. We had mammoth teeth in the laundry room, right next to the Tide and the Clorox.

I remember when the president was shot and I remember when Cuba was the place that was going to send the bombs to kill us and I remember sulfur water and I remember the dark, brackish river that flowed under the dock where we fished for catfish and I remember when my grandfather and all of his man-friends wore bow ties, even to visit each other and their wives all wore those little clips that fastened on to their sweaters so they could be like capes, draped over their shoulders, and hair nets with tiny beads on them and I remember I loved those hair nets on the beautiful white hair of those old ladies who were so sweet to me.

I remember when kids were expected to have the sense not to get snake bit or drown in the river or run away and I remember when kids knew how to treat the wounds they got when they fell off their bikes with Iodine that stung like holy hell and Band-Aids. I remember pulling sandspurs out of my body and cactus needles and there were a million ways to die but we didn't. We were tough little people and the bomb didn't kill us either.

I am remembering so many things today, this quiet morning, and it's the Fall Equinox and the moon is almost full. The earth tips a bit today and perhaps it is the moon pulling these memories out of me, or the gravity of the earth in its tipping; they are pouring out of me like milk from a tipped pitcher.

I remember when men squatted on their haunches, wiry men, and kids played in the jungle-woods all day and women said, "Go play outside!" and they wore curlers in their hair, sometimes even to go to the store, and they were never still, and men like Dorsal had blond hair they wore Bryl Cream in and it flipped up a little bit in the back and women teased their hair into beehives on their heads and smoothed over the top layer and it was something to see. I remember the wooden handle and the pig bristles of the beautiful hair brush my mother bought me from the Fuller Brush man and I remember when we washed our brushes and combs in the sink every week with ammonia and water, and summers lasted forever and ever.

I remember when the world which came to us from the television was all in black and white and so the President's wife's dress was gray with black splotches all over it when her husband died and the flag draping his coffin was black and white striped and we had to fill in the colors in our minds and our minds were so busy then, filling in the colors, the details of that black-and-white world but not the night sky which was black as ink with stars as white as new-born silver because those were its colors and the mosquito coil burned with an orange tip, eating itself, sending acrid but somehow pleasing smoke up into the night air and the mosquitoes, invisible in the darkness, still hummed in our ears and when we looked up at the sky to see all of those stars, we somehow knew in our child bones that this was something we would always remember, even when we were very, very old.

Heat Stroke

I almost screwed the pooch this morning. I waited until it was too late to walk and that's just the truth. I wanted to take pictures so I took my camera and somehow stopping is worse than just keeping on going. Plus, I walked down to the river because I hadn't done that in a while and I wanted to see it. My soul told me to and so I did but I think I would have been better off if I'd checked with my physical being first.
Well, these things happen and I lived and I'm home and I went out to refrigerator in the garage and cut some melon for the chickens and found a Gatorade and I'm actually drinking it.
I haven't drunk Gatorade since I was in labor with Jessie and she's twenty-one years old.

Anyway, I got some nice pictures. Would you like to see them?
I hope so.

I took about fifty pictures of clitoria but only a few came out. I like this one a great deal

because as you can see quite clearly, the labia has been pierced. Plus, it's in focus. Relatively.

Here's one which you may have to click on if you want to see a butterfly sipping from the sweetest part of the flower.
And may I just remind all of us that flowers are indeed the sexual organs of a plant and if anyone has any doubt about evolution, I would just say to look at the clitoria and then gaze upon the clitoris and realize that we are not just related to the apes but to the flowers, too.
This may be biologically inaccurate but I believe it.

A Gulf Fritallary butterfly.

A dragonfly and I do not know his name. I have seen more dragonflies this year than I have ever seen before. Same with butterflies, I think. This one seemed to be following me or at least accompanying me on the path to the creek but indulged me by stopping and spreading his wings for me to take his picture.
Why do all butterflies seem to be female while all dragonflies seem to be male?

Swamp Mallow, I think. Obviously related to the okra, the hibiscus, the Confederate Rose.

The wild grapes. The foxes must be standing under them at night, plotting as to how to reach them. Foxes CAN climb trees, actually. And do. I think foxes must be crosses between dogs and cats. Again, biologically this may not actually be true.

And finally, the river. Or creek. Today it was a creek. Sometimes it is a river.
My soul is grateful I let it have its way, even if my body was not so happy at the time.
I always know it's there but sometimes I just have to go lay eyes on it to reassure myself.

If any of these pictures resonate with you and if you are looking for something to read, I recommend you go find a copy of either Cross Creek or The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. No finer summer reading to be found.

Now. Excuse me. I have to go lay under a fan.

What I Do When Mr. Moon Is Gone

Wow. I am tired. I am really, really tired. Of course, I don't get a lot of sleep when I know that Owen is coming early. I think it's nervous excitement. I don't put on make-up when he's coming anymore, but still- I am nervously excited to see that boy. Maybe I shouldn't confess that, but I have to. It's like when you have a baby and you realize that no one told you how much and how deeply you fall in love with that baby. Like, okay. Like you never knew was possible. It's downright romantic.

But besides that, taking care of Owen sort of wore me out too. He's such a wiggle-bunny-monkey. And he got pissed at me because I dared to take a shower and could not pick him up immediately when he began to fuss. And I carried him in the new backpack.

Okay.

It seemed like such a good idea- a backpack for the little man! I am STRONG WOMAN! I did it thirty years ago. Why not now?
And he loved it. I put him in that thing and this is what he looked like:


And this:


And oh yeah, this:


So what's a granny gonna do but hoist that thing on her shoulders and walk to the post office? As soon as I put it on, I remembered why it hadn't been SUCH a great thing when I was in my twenties and thirties. My back and shoulder muscles immediately began to burn. I'm in pretty good shape for an old lady but I have not carried anything on my back in years. But I am stubborn and I am hard-headed and what's a little twenty-five pounds on my back?
And he sang in his baby language and he was happy and when we got to the Post Office Miss Joanne said, "Doesn't he look happy?" and I said, "Yes. He loves it and it may put me in the hospital."
Well. We'll work up to the big trips. We will not be hiking the Appalachian Trail anytime soon. Maybe next fall with Hank and May. We'll see.

But anyway, I'm tired and practically everyone I know right now is complaining of symptoms ranging from profound fatigue to hurts-when-I-breathe to I feel crazy!

I am thinking it is pollen. When you have a spring like ours and the oak trees are sending out their love-dust and so are the pines and every blooming thing which blooms- you have pollen. Our cars are covered. This computer I write on is covered. Every thing in every room of my house is covered. With yellow dust. It's thick and when you water the plants outside it runs like a yellow river of thick, soupy yellow.
But what are you going to do?

It's spring.

And Mr. Moon is on the island which means I have no time constraints at all and although I had bought pepper plants and eggplant plants to put in the garden and the bamboo is going to take over the universe if I don't kick it over soon,

(Click on it to realize the full effect)

I just could not make myself do anything beyond hauling the camera out and taking pictures during what we photographers (hahaha!) call "The Magic Hour."

There's a butterfly on the Tung Tree blossoms which are supposedly extremely poisonous but if so, this butterfly must have the antidote because she was sipping from one flower after another.

The heirloom rose (and like the butterfly, I do not know its name- the SHAME, THE SHAME!) which when we moved in, the former owner told us that no matter how hard we tried, we would not be able to kill. He was right.


A Very Straight Row in Mr. Moon's garden. Yes, it is supposed to be OUR garden but I can't follow his straight-row planting rules so I just weed. I think this row is going to be bush beans. He has a (and I am not making this up) ten-foot piece of PVC which he uses as a row-planting guide. I can't deal with that much organization. But you know- he is on the island. I did buy those peppers and eggplant today and I WILL BE PLANTING THEM while he is gone and yeah, he'll probably pass out or weep when he sees the imperfection of my planting.
Oh well.



When we southerners see this, we say, "That collard done bolted."
Yep. Those beautiful flowers mean the plant is done with making leaves. Done. Give it to the chickens. Plant an eggplant. Plant a squash. Plant a watermelon. Collards ain't gonna make no more this year.



And this- well, this is just a sturdy oak which looks like it might be holding up that gold-shot sky with the azaleas cuddling up next to it. Magic hour indeed. See that tree's muscles? I do.

I stopped by the hen house where Miss Betty and Miss Mable were already tucked up on the roost. This is how sweet my hens are. They let me just love on them when they're on the roost:

Miss Mable looks mean but she's not. Not really. I love to pat my chickens.

After I took pictures I was watering the front porch plants when a neighbor came by who is running for county commissioner and we chatted for awhile at the fence. I signed his petition and he said all the right things but you know- he's a politician. Politicians make their bread by saying the right things. I studied his face and it had a certain beauty in it but I couldn't get a real read on his heart which is odd for me. Oh well. He's my neighbor. And I believed him when he agreed with me on what a beautiful place our county is, but hell. Who wouldn't think that tonight?

And now it's time to make my supper and eat it and go to bed. I have a pile of washed greens to eat in salad and a pile of different washed greens to cook. I have a piece of salmon and some quinoa. Or maybe I'll just eat a bowl of cereal. It's just food. And I am far more tired than I am hungry.

It's been a good day, y'all. I hope yours has been too.

Why I Do Love Where I Live

Took a walk this morning. It was actually more of a walk-about with the camera. I realized that I was a bit late if I wanted to get wild azalea shots and same with the dogwood growing in the old graveyard.
Well. I've been busy. What can I say?
But here you are. Here's what I got.
This is Florida, y'all. The part of it I live in, anyway.

Not one month ago I couldn't walk where these trees are because the river had become, as they say, unmanageable. It had grown full of itself from all the rain we had. So full of itself it had to spread out everywhere. In fact, last time I stood in the same place I was standing when I took that picture, wild ducks were swimming right in the middle of all those trees.
I see that the river has gotten control of itself and humbly retreated to where it belongs in its own sandy banks.

But here's how high it got on the oak tree. See that watermark?

The field where the water had risen to and covered is now greening up and there are what I call swamp lilies everywhere. I do not know their real name. I apologize. To you, not to them. They don't give a good goddamn what anyone calls them. They just open and bask their faces in the sun.

Here's another pretty little flower whose name I do not know. It's a sweet little thing, isn't it?

And another.

Here's a cypress wearing new leaves. It stands on the river's bank and I imagine it is hundreds and hundreds of years old.

An oak with moss. Just a random oak tree.

Here's the old hidden graveyard. Kori, this one is for you because I know you love it as much as I do.

Some palmettos in what was the flood plain.

Water-sculpture in a stagnant pool.

It is going to be SUCH a year for dewberries and blackberries. Such a good year. These are dewberry blossoms.


Here's one last one of the river as it meanders, as it wanders.

For those of you who are wondering, it's the same color as iced tea because of tannic acid from the leaves which drop into it. Which is the same thing (imagine!) as in, yes, iced tea.
So I suppose you could say I live in a place where the rivers run with iced tea.
If they had sugar in them, there wouldn't be any left to look at. We'd drink it all up.

Have a lovely day, y'all. Owen is here and I must shift gears and hold my baby-love.

Ms. Moon

How In Hell Did I Get So Lucky?

We went out last night to Kool Beanz for our supper and it was nice. Mr. Moon had procured a new vehicle (new for him) yesterday for resale but before he re-sales it, I think he just wants to drive it around. It's a yellow jeep and so we got in it and headed to town, a little dressed-up, my face painted some, and we thought that with the FSU kids out of town for spring break, we'd have no problem getting a seat.
Ha!
We probably waited an hour before we were seated at the bar, our favorite place to eat because we can watch the chefs doing their magic with flame and meat and veg and sauce and also because I can blow kisses to the dishwasher who has the most beautiful face in the world.

As always, it was delicious but we way over-ordered and have enough in the refrigerator for about four more meals.

I do love to go out, I do love to eat something I did not cook and I certainly do enjoy not cleaning up after but it's odd, somehow, being waited on. And I never feel as if I fit in. Everyone there last night looked like people who lead lives so different from mine but of course, that's probably not true. I felt better and more comfortable when a woman who is a server at the restaurant came in and sat at the bar next to us with a copy of Another Roadside Attraction, one of my favorite books in the world. It was her night off and if that isn't an indication of good food, then I don't know what is. We chatted and it turns out that she knows May and that they share a last name and it's an unusual last name. My ex-husband's people were from Virginia and so are the people of this girl. I can see a resemblance in her face to my daughter's. She is beautiful too.
So we talked with her and had a few snips of conversation with one of the chefs who was wearing a fedora to cook in. His name is Ted and I asked him if it was short for Theodore. He said it was and I thought about how few Teds there are anymore. Ted Danson, I suppose. But I doubt there are any little Teddys in the daycares, which is sad. Such a good name, Ted.

We rumbled home in the yellow Jeep and it was such a luscious experience, falling into a bed where the sheets had been dried on the line. I slept so well. I woke up this morning with the congestion. I felt it coming on last night as we waited for our supper. I could literally feel my sinuses swelling, feel the mild pain of that.

I met Kathleen this morning at the Opera House where the Altrusas were having their annual Junk and Treasure sale. Or, as Kathleen called it, The Drunken Treasure sale. She bought a few things, I bought nothing and then we went across the street for coffee (me), tea (her), a blueberry muffin (her) and a scone (me). It was amazingly sweet, sitting there and laughing with each other, saying hello to people on their way to the counter to order. Monticello is a very small town and even I see someone I know, every where I go there. When we were at the Opera House for the Drunken Treasure sale women kept coming up to me and telling me how great I'd been in the play, how much they'd enjoyed it. I love to hear words like that, of course, but it's funny how lightly those words skim over me. For some reason, I cannot take my acting abilities or what other people may think of them seriously. It's all play. Children play and pretend as soon as they are old enough to talk and we could all do that at one time or another. I'm just lucky enough to have the opportunity now and then to do it again.

I've already started dreaming of the Opera House again. When I'm not involved in a play there, I dream of it. I feel so at home there. I know where the back doors are and I know where the secret bathroom is and I've been up to the scary prop room above the dressing room. It's dark up there and the stairway is funky and I don't like to go up there alone to find old phones and hats and our sound effects toys. I've done it, but I don't like it.

Jan was there, working at the sale, and she has a bad cold. I offered to go make her a cup of tea and I did, the Altrusa ladies curious to know what I was doing in the kitchen. I was tempted to steal some of the lemon poppy seed poundcake which one of them had brought, but I did not. It looked very good though.

I love the south. I love the way there are garden clubs and Altrusa clubs and camellias and azaleas and big old courthouses and locally owned coffee shops and surprisingly good Chinese food and people who know you every where you go and stop to chat. I love home made baked goods and I love knowing secrets about people because they trust me to keep them. Secrets that would shock other people if they knew. I love that there are all sorts of people in these small southern towns. Not just the scratch-the-surface-and-you'll-find-a-racist people, whom you would expect to live in such places, but also a lot of crazy left-wing liberals who wouldn't vote Republican if you held their feet to the fire. You'd be surprised at how tolerant people can be if they know your heart and find it to be good. Even the scandal of Jan and Jack seems to be blowing over. At least they haven't kicked her out of the Altrusa Club.

"We really do live in Mayberry, don't we?" I asked Kathleen as we left Tupalo's. The woman who runs the Milady's Clothing store next to the restaurant was sitting outside in the sun, talking to a gentleman who was also sitting there. "Doesn't the sun feel good?" she asked, and her smile was as big as the world.

Oh yes. The sun feels good. And here I am about to go out into it to leisurely weed and perhaps trim up the Confederate Jasmine which is pulling the chain link fence over with its bountiful, milky vines. There are delicious leftovers in the refrigerator and I do not have to go to the Opera House to put on a show tonight but I have visited there today and had a wonderful time. Kathleen and Jan and Pat and I are talking about forming a secret society called The Jezebels. We already have a motto- "Once a Jezebel, always a Jezebel," and also, "The Unredeemables." We have decided that we will have a secret knock and passwords. We shall get together and drink champagne (or beer for me) and eat chocolate and talk about our Jezebel experiences.
But don't tell anyone- it's a secret.
And it won't be a club. I don't join clubs. But I will gladly be a member of the Jezebel Society.

I have noticed the redbud in the yard is starting to bloom and when I was across the street, letting the dogs out for the people who live there who are on vacation in New York City, I took a picture of their blooming pear tree.


I hope it does well this year because they always offer me as many pears as I can take. They are the gritty sand pear, or at least that's what we call them and their flesh is more apple than pear-like and they make the very best pies and preserves.
Another thing I like about the south. Sand pears.

I hear the snap of the seeds as the cardinals feed beside me and the cluck of chickens and the feisty rooster-crowing going on between my rooster and the ones next door. I hear mockingbirds, I see that blue sky, I have a beautiful weeding tool, practically new clippers and I'm wearing my overalls. So is Mr. Moon.

Last night was fun and I enjoyed it but it is here, in my own little county, my own little world, where I feel at home, surrounded by flowers and by birds, with a bit of work to do, work that can be done outside.

I hope your Saturday is going as well as mine. I would wish that for everyone in the entire world but especially for you.

I really do.